Enable Tab Key Navigation in Safari

Navigating elements on web pages with the Tab key is a useful feature in most web browsers, but since the release of Mac OS X Lion the new default behavior in Safari seems to limit what the tab key selects on a page. Here’s how to enable tab key navigation across all actionable elements on a webpage:

From the Safari menu pull down and select “Preferences”

Click on the “Advanced” icon and check the box next to “Press tab to highlight each item on a webpage”

Note the sub-text points out that if you press Option+Tab then you will select only the text input boxes and menu items, which is the default behavior of Safari and Chromes tab key navigation.

4 Comments

Thanks for the help. What a poor decision for a company that claims to want to put accessibility first. Safari doesn’t show CSS outlines for me either, works in all other browsers. Confirmed–going to keep using chrome.

I prefer the text input only tabbing, that is generally what I want to tab between and not much else. I could see this being useful with the Element Inspector, that plus the increased accessibility is probably why this is in advanced settings and not enabled to begin with.

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